Open Letter to AI from a Project Manager
It would be great to have you as a partner in crime for project failures
Dear AI,
It is good to hear you are making significant advancements in every field. I got to know that you are also developing AI tools that will benefit the project managers. Some of us fear that you might make PMs redundant, as you have made many others already.
Dear AI, unlike other PMs, I am pleased to see you making advancements in the Project management field. If you want to make us redundant, please, you are more than welcome to do so.
As it is, the Project Manager work is a thankless and tireless job. When the project is successful, it is the team members’ efforts, but when the project fails, it is always due to a Project manager’s incompetency.
Dear AI, I think it would be great to have a partner in crime for project failures. Instead of a human PM, AI could now be made the scapegoat for failures.
Project managers are struggling to get their due recognition in many companies. Due to a lack of support from higher management, some PMs are working as executive assistants. They are only responsible for “filling out forms,” “booking meetings,” “writing minutes,” “getting approvals, and “sending emails.”
You will make senior management happy with your AI-induced Project management tools. It will be a boom for all such companies, where project managers work as executive assistants rather than leaders.
Dear AI, I always thought project management is common sense, which is not commonly found. I am sure you will crack this common sense in one of your Large Language Models (LLM) and build it in your AI tools.
By the way, this does not mean that I am skeptical about your capabilities. I have been reading about how different Project Management tools add AI features to their offerings. I have tested a few of these tools and would be happy to write a testimonial if you want to silence all those PMs who are giving you the cold shoulder and who feel that AI is not for them.
Dear AI, I feel that your newly born cousin, Generative AI (GAI), is a real friend to us PMs. It will give us a helping hand in creating project documents and status reports. These tasks take much of our productive time and sometimes get deprioritized due to urgent firefighting tasks.
I feel that Project management is not given its due recognition in some companies, as it is understood that documentation and reporting are the primary responsibilities of a Project Manager. With the help of GAI, these tasks can be offloaded from PMs so they can focus on something more creative, meaningful, and intellectually stimulating.
There is a saying,
“Action speaks louder than words.”
but GAI has now given a new dimension to this saying:
“Prompts speak louder than words.”
I have tried some use cases in “ChatGPT” and “Asana” to understand how GAI is helping PMs. Here are my findings:
Documentation:
Now, we can ask ChatGPT to create project documents like project plans, communication plans, and risk registers. We can prompt it for a specific template and use it to fill in the project information. We can also provide project-specific information in our prompt, and it can provide a sample project plan for us.
Here is a Sample Prompt:
“As a project manager, create a requirement document for a software product like Grammarly.”
Status Reports:
“Asana”, a Project management tool, has the feature to create a draft status update report for a chosen project plan in the tool.
Sample status report sections drafted by Asana:
Summary
Initiatives this work supports
Current Blockers
Release milestones: Key upcoming milestones
Next Steps & Action Items
With the documentation and automated project status reports, the PMs will be able to do what they should do, i.e., to ensure that the project accomplishes its goals.
Dear AI, I feel that some PMs only do the documentation and project status reporting, so they might not be happy with taking your support. They might be your biggest enemy, too, but we know that technology will eventually win, and these PMs will soon be changing their LinkedIn status to “Open to Work.”
Hopefully, this might lead them to learn to do the actual project manager’s work, who needs to wear multiple hats as a strategic advisor, innovator, communicator, big thinker, and versatile manager.
Dear AI, I didn’t mean to scare you with my last statement. You would do what you do best, and a PM would do what they need to do best; the outcome with both of us working together will be a successful project and, eventually, a profitable organization.
Dear AI, I am looking forward to more AI advancements in Project management. Besides Documentation and Status Reports, there are some more responsibilities in my PM job that you might support.
Can you please also add this functionality to your AI models?
I would need your help in the following areas, as this is where I had to put in more effort, but I would not mind sharing my load with you and benefitting from your vastly trained data models.
- Team members should update their task status without me asking them repeatedly.
- Team members should ensure that tasks are finished on time. You should detect any deviation or probability of deviation.
- For any bottlenecks they face, find solutions, or give them a choice of solutions and then provide the best option.
- Let the senior management create the project report as per their specifications.
- Send the weekly updates to stakeholders.
- Allow the senior management team to use the prompt for any project queries.
- Transcribe the online and offline meetings and send the summary to the attendees.
- For any feature conflicts, automatically search the project repository and share the supporting document with the stakeholders.
- Send milestone reminders to the team members.
- Summarize an email thread.
Dear AI, I hope you will find this list useful for your future roadmap.
I am looking forward to you being an integral part of a PM life and enriching us with your smart intelligence.
PMs should become smart PMs who can delegate part of the work to their intelligent assistant. This technology can help project managers automate mundane tasks, freeing time for more strategic initiatives.
Dear AI, I feel that you would make a change that many PMs like me were unsuccessful in doing. We have tried to tell the organizations that a Project manager is critical to a project’s success. But so far, barring a few companies, many still think that a project manager is an administrator’s job and can be easily done by anyone in that organization.
With your capabilities, companies who do not believe in a PM capability will hire you instead of devaluing the project management profession by pushing the PMs into a side role, where they just sit quietly in their corner, create to-dos, and do not bother anyone.
Dear AI, you must have already seen a pattern in my letter. I want to bring the glory back to the project manager role. I am heavily relying on your capabilities to fulfill this dream.
May you find more investors, entrepreneurs, and adopters in the coming years.
Your supporter & well-wisher,
A Project Manager
